371–378 of 378 posts
BYD is a formidable competitor and a great product for less.
It's strange to me that some Americans will cheer on Chinese companies over Tesla, even overlooking those companies questionable labour practices. (I don't know if you're American)
Musk expects ~80% Of Tesla's value will be Optimus robots [1]. It can't be any other way given that he helped elect a President that's against electric cars, against regulation for limiting climate change, against collaborating with our European allies. https://www.theautopian.com/elon-musk-doesnt-see-cars-as-a-p...
But at least Meta's legacy businesses (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) were still valuable enough to fall back on - whereas Tesla's seems to be tanking. Only their utility-scale fixed battery business seems to have much potential if they can't turn around their dwindling car business.
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> NMC li-ion batteries have fallen down to $100 per kWh on the _pack_ level (not cell). When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery , you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP. The problem is you can't sell a boring $40k truck for $60k, so instead they tried to make an "interesting" truck for…
> When the Cybertruck was released in 2023 it was $139, making it more like $18k. And that's just the battery, you still need to make the rest of the truck and pay all your other overhead before you get to the MSRP. But the rest of the car is not actually that pricey. Motors and power electrics are now reasonably priced, especially if you're making an actual working truck that doesn't need to do 60 mph in 3 seconds.…
If you're making an actual working truck, the motor and power electronics need to be more substantial because they have to handle being able to e.g. pull a loaded trailer up a steep grade.
> The frame and body are cheap.
The piece of metal is fairly cheap. Now fill every door with power electronics, add glass, add climate control, the thing's going to need tires, wheels, axles, brakes, something to make power brakes work without an engine to provide vacuum, steering, suspension, etc.
Most of the cost of a vehicle isn't the powertrain.
> So a decent $40k truck is definitely possible now.
It's not a question of if you can do $40k. It's a question of, does the electric powertrain and battery still cost more than the ICE power train, and therefore require you to cut something else in order to avoid charging more?
$30k trucks exist but people don't want a $30k truck for $40k.
> I figure that the US automakers instead decided to wall off the competition for as long as possible to wring out every last drop of profit.
The obvious problem with this is that they could keep out BYD and hypothetically kick out Nissan and VW etc., but what are Ford and GM supposed to do as the battery prices come down when Tesla just sets the prices of their existing lineup consistent with the falling battery costs, much less releases any new models?
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Why don't all the other automakers wise up and just start promising full self driving "next year" as well?
Because their stocks aren't memes, their investors are serious, nobody really GAF about self driving and fully autonomous driving isn't actually the "killer app" many think it is.
I’d pay at least double for a car with FSD. More if the car’s longevity could be established. Is that killer enough? (Real question).
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Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant. That being said, yeah, profits were down a bit but a lot of that was stock compensation and other things. In practical terms they went from a cash position of 36 billion to 44 billion. They are in a phenomenal position financially as they have very little debt. By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stella…
> Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant. Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence , demonstrates the shares are overvalued. > By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion. 2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $10…
Tesla is far more than a car company. Even someone who hates them can recognize that
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> Not sure what relevance Musk selling shares has to do with profit they've made. That seems completely irrelevant. Selling shares for more than the company made in its entire existence , demonstrates the shares are overvalued. > By comparison GM made 2.7 billion and Stellantis lost 20 billion. 2.7/3.7 = 0.73; GM's market cap is $77.67bn, using them as your framing of the problem gets you to a Tesla market cap of $10…
Unfortunately you don’t understand what “overvalued” means. The price is what people are willing to pay. Tesla is far more than a car company. Even someone who hates them can recognize that
Price != value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
> Tesla is far more than a car company.
No, they're not. The only thing they sell are cars and car-stuff. They have yet to sell those humanoid robots they show off. Hell, there's other car companies who also make humanoid robots, who have more than twice Tesla's revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Motor_Group
Even Tesla's subsidiary, Tesla Energy, which breaks out beyond "cars" is only about 10% of revenue of the car company, so even if you argue their ownership structure makes the group "more", it's still not "far more", but rather "rounding error".
Tesla's AI is just car AI, which other car manufacturers also have, and bluntly seem to be doing a bit better with it.
Even if they were "much more", a 90% drop in market cap would still see it priced like a high-growth tech firm, of the kind which people are independently worried may be in a bubble.
When the market prices this in, Tesla's share price will go down 90-99% on the international market. Perhaps not in USD though, depends how hard that goes weird.
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Judging by the news isn’t the pivot to creating autonomous driving systems for other manufacturers cars? If I’m understanding correctly the pivot is to sell just the autonomous driving systems. This way it can be trained on more data. It’s a hard sell to do this while competing against the car makers whose business they are trying to court. Selling actual cars was like Uber when they started with a black car service.…
What does any of this have to do with Optimus? Driving a car by sticking a humanoid robot in the driver seat would be amusing but is a terrible idea.
In light of this I think it makes sense though. Tesla lost the government subsidies so it can't compete. Possibly the only way it can would be to have an autonomous workforce then to leverage that into selling picks and shovels (Optimus humanoid robots) to other automotive manufacturers.
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The US version is all boston dynamics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeeiN9smjjY
Unitree is doing everything Boston Dynamics is doing and more without a physical safety barrier between the robots and the humans.
Even if we take into account the smaller size of the robots, it's still impressive, a bad input at the wrong time could easily cause of one of the robots to seriously injure someone, the fact this didn't happen and the producers and the company were confident that it wouldn't happen is the real breakthrough moment.